There is a certain confidence that comes with being a man that I don’t think I’ll ever have.
I don’t mean confidence in the traditional, arrogant sense, though many men seem to have this too. I mean the universal, unbridled confidence that makes them all stand in the mirror and think: I am tall.
There’s something beautiful about it. This tallness universality. The way a man can put random numbers in on Hinge, as if you will not literally see that he is lying when you meet up. I myself have met so many men who claim to be 6 feet tall, who are all completely different heights, that I’m starting to believe the real 6 feet are the friends we made along the way.
This ‘Male Tallness Epidemic’, as I have decided to call it, is a phenomenon I have always been fascinated by. Perhaps because height is such a strange thing to lie about – it isn’t something like your age, which most people can’t really check anyway, but sitting right there, visible to everyone.
So, I decided to investigate it.
The ‘Tallness’ Experiment
My methodology, as an English student, was simple: I would ask a man how tall he was, record his answer, and then measure him. My sample was, admittedly, not particularly scientific, but I thought that if there was an epidemic of male tallness, ten to fifteen unsuspecting university men should be enough to begin detecting it.
Unfortunately, my research career was cut tragically short by a respiratory infection also known as freshers’ flu. Instead of spending my first weeks at university stalking men around St Andrews, I was in bed coughing so consistently I considered writing a formal apology to my new neighbours. The final sample therefore consisted of just five men, which is not enough to make any serious claims about the male population, but is enough to make me suspicious.
The Results
Despite this unfortunately small sample, the results were remarkably consistent.
The first man told me he was 5’10”; he was 5’9″. The second told me he was 6’2″; he was 6’1″. The third told me he was 6’6″, and, in what became the great triumph of my research, he was actually 6’6″. Finally, another man told me he was 5’11”; he was 5’10”. Including my own previous experience of a man who claimed to be 5’9″ and was actually 5’8″, four out of five men in my very limited sample had apparently acquired exactly one inch somewhere between being measured and being asked.
One inch.
Discussion
There is something particularly interesting about that one inch because it is just large enough to matter socially and small enough to be defensible. If a man told me he was 5’9″ and I measured him at 5’5″, there’s an obvious disconnect. But 5’9″ becoming 5’10” feels different. It could be a simple matter of rounding. It could be pure optimism.
But I have to ask myself, if everyone is rounding in the same direction, at what point does it become something else?
Perhaps the answer lies in what height represents. We have long since attached ideas of strength, protection, authority and attractiveness to being tall, particularly for men. A tall man, after all, is harder to overlook. He takes up more space in a room. In the idea of masculinity that values physical presence as a kind of ‘proof’, he ticks every box.
And the six-foot mark is the clearest expression of this. It is an arbitrary number, yes, but significant nonetheless. Because there are men who are nearly six feet tall, who can say they are basically six feet, who are only one small, perfectly reasonable inch away, and there are the men who simply write 6’0″ into the little box on Hinge and let the number speak for itself.
And I have to wonder how much of this is actually about women.
There’s a familiar idea that women only want tall men — six-foot minimum, preferably more, any less and you better hope you have a good personality and hairline. But I am less interested in whether every woman really does want a man above a certain height than I am in the fact that so many men seem to believe that she does. The expectation has become part of masculinity itself: a man should be tall, and if he is not, there is always the possibility of making himself a little taller.
An inch is hardly anything. It does not make him more attractive, or funnier, or reply to your messages faster. And yet, this research has shown that it is worth claiming.
Validity of the Experiment
I would like to stress that this investigation was conducted with the highest possible standards, by which I mean I had a tape measure and asked several men (my friends) to stand against a wall.
There are obvious limitations. The men were not randomly selected, the measurements were not conducted in a laboratory, and I cannot guarantee that every man was standing perfectly straight.
Most importantly, five men cannot tell us anything definitive about men as a whole.
They can, however, tell us that four of the five men I measured were exactly one inch shorter than they claimed to be. It could be a crazy coincidence.
Personally, I remain unconvinced.
Conclusion
I’m not sure I have an answer to any of the questions I have posed. Some men may be rounding, some may genuinely remember themselves as taller than they are.
But I keep coming back to that inch.
As women, we spend so much time being told by society to be comfortable with ourselves, to accept the bodies we have, to stop comparing ourselves to impossible versions of what we should look like. And yet men seem to have found a much simpler solution: if the body does not quite meet the expectation, adjust the number.
I suppose there are worse forms of delusion. And really, who am I to take that one inch away from them?